Search Results

“... It​ was during the fallout from Watergate that the American public first heard of MK-Ultra, the most notorious of the secret mind control programmes that the CIA ran through the 1950s and 1960s. After Nixon’s men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up ...”

“... substance has been described more thoroughly and from such a variety of perspectives,’ Mike Jay writes in his new history, Mescaline. Its use in the Americas dates back thousands of years. It was the first psychedelic analysed by Western scientists, and in the early decades of the 20th century the only substance of its kind available to ...”

“... it’ (Coleridge had wanted the commission himself, but would probably never have completed it). Mike Jay’s new book on Beddoes is fascinating, exciting, entertaining, where Stock’s is dull, dull, dull. And yet the more I enjoyed it, the more I began to revise my opinion of what Stock achieved, though perhaps not to the point where I will feel ...”

“... complaining that he’s such a ‘paragon of virtue’ that he scuttles Joe Klein’s book Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home – the ‘heroes’ are Eric and a few others, but mostly Eric. It’s not that the reviewer doubted Eric’s wonderfulness, just that he seemed a little dull: Consider Eric Greitens, a former Rhodes ...”

“... in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz. ‘Mike’ from the San Fernando Valley was an incessant, soft-spoken maker of order and system, a godfather with no god other than success. No one was more prepared or implacable in negotiation. That closed smile was a lever with which to open a bottle, or a ...”

“... but only really for people who are too restless to read the book published in association with it. Mike Jay’s superb This Way Madness Lies (Thames & Hudson, £24.95) is as good a book on the subject as I’ve read – and I’ve read a few. Jay co-curated the exhibition, but it’s here, between stiff boards rather ...”

“... There’s a hopeful proposal to float a maypole down the Thames. Several people want an ‘open mike’, an impromptu ‘People’s Parliament’. About forty people attend the RTS meetings, the majority of them men. They include environmentalists, social justice campaigners, socialists and anarchists. There are three rather stiff rules: no smoking, no ...”

“... Peter Ueberroth. By no coincidence, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy – on the Jay Leno Tonight show – on the day Issa withdrew. It was clear from the outset that if a ‘No on Recall’ vote supporting Davis failed to pass by even a slight margin, only a fraction of the votes cast for Davis would be enough to elect one of the alternative ...”

“... a good deal.’ In form, Doctor Criminale is an old-fashioned quest novel. Francis Jay, a young British journalist – trained in deconstruction and cultural politics at Sussex – is left high and dry when his paper (evidently the ill-fated Sunday Correspondent) folds. Following a disastrous Booker ceremony at which he comports himself on ...”

“... bar. I leafed through a book I had just bought, Greater Gotham, the second volume of Mike Wallace’s history of New York from the Spanish-American War of 1898 to the end of the First World War, and I read the pages about Greenwich Village – these were the years when the Village became the bohemian quarter of the city. Then, on my way back to ...”

“... make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a performance: ‘We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable ...”

“... is). They could be reported by the mainstream press, as quoted ‘allegations’. Word of mouth, Jay Leno and the cartoonists would do the rest. When (as he has recently been doing rather often) Matt Drudge addresses journalists’ conventions he likes to strike a crusading pose. He foresees, as he told the National Press Conference of 2 June, ‘an era ...”

“... at the Glen, a racetrack 150 miles from the original site. Performers included Miley Cyrus and Jay-Z. A few wrinkly legends, including the Zombies and Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin famously turned down the offer to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of ...”

“... with dubious opinions about race relations and strong regional enthusiasms. (My father’s cousin, Mike Greenblatt, wrote a well-known football song: ‘I’m a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech, and a hell of an engineer.’) Another relation ventured out west, with his wife and two small children, to try his hand as a pedlar in Wyoming. This was the occasion ...”

“... he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s ...”